IN THE AGE OF MONSTERS… In 1930, the Italian analyst and communist Antonio Gramsci wrote in his “Prison Notebooks”:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.
This phrase is usually quoted in a simplified form, which renders its intended meaning much more vividly: The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time for monsters.
Back then, Fascism had prevailed in Italy, Hitler was on the verge of taking power, Gramsci himself was in prison, and the workers’ movement was at an impasse. We should not view this solely as an expression of despair. The monsters Gramsci saw were not prevailing due to their strength; they were the result of society’s inability to transition from the old world to the new – from capitalism to socialism. They were the result of the decadence of the old system, which in its senility took the form of Fascism and Nazism, and of the weakness of the new system which could not yet function and created its own “morbid symptoms” in the form of Stalinism and the degenerate Social Democracy of his time.
We are witnessing analogous phenomena today. The parallels with the 1930s are tragically evident. Just as the 1929 crash created a global economic crisis, the 2008 crash did the same, on a much larger scale. The rise of Fascism and Nazism back then is not a very different phenomenon from the rise of today’s Far-Right. Japan’s attack on China and Franco’s coup in Spain are phenomena analogous to the suppression of the Arab Spring, the war in Ukraine, the Genocide in Gaza.
It is within this framework that we must view the behavior of Trump, culminating in the attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of Maduro. Trump is not a creation of a healthy capitalism; he is the result of a senile capitalism. A capitalism that has lost its ability to automatically transform private interest into a socially creative force. A capitalism where the rule of a class has been replaced by the rule of a handful of billionaires who control everything. The “ruling class” has shrunk to a handful of oligarchs who arbitrarily decide the fate of the world. And when decisions are arbitrary, their logic becomes less and less logical. Nor is he alone in the world.
Just as the Trump phenomenon is a creation of the arbitrary power of American monopolies, Putin came to power through the chaotic formation of Russian monopolies and maintains it as the protector of a handful of oligarchs. At a less decisive level, analogous cases are authoritarian leaders like Erdoğan, Netanyahu, Modi. In all these countries, the concept of democracy has degenerated, and elected leaders act like dictators, with little possibility of control. Societies are becoming increasingly authoritarian, individual liberties are continuously restricted, and logic is replaced by arbitrariness. European countries are not alien to this phenomenon. Even worse, the smaller their significance in global developments, the more easily the arbitrary behaviors of their leaders are accepted.
The examples of Christodoulides and Mitsotakis are quite characteristic…Themos Demetriou, 2026-01-06
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